Classical genres and English poetry

by William H. Race

xix 235p hardback, red cloth with white illustrated jacket, very good condition, minimal wear, very light marks to jacket, binding firm, pages clean and neat like new, very good copy of uncommon title

235 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

William H. Race is Paddison Professor of Classics, Emeritus, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reviews

[max · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the privilege and extreme pleasure of studying with the author while a graduate student some years back at Vanderbilt University. I learned more from him about genre and rhetoric and the secrets of Greek literature than anyone else in the world.

Typical of the style that marks all of Race's critical works (he is one of the foremost Pindar scholars in the world), the writing in this book is succinct, lucid, and informative. He has a highly engaging approach to his subject.

The book explains how generic and rhetorical types (e.g., the recusatio, priamel, lament, ekphrasis, and other forms) inform many different kinds of poems from antiquity to the present. Having a basic knowledge of how these forms operate in a given poem can be extremely helpful in understanding what the poem is all about.

Perhaps what I like most about this book is that it reflects the author's wide-ranging knowledge and sensitive interpretations of literary works that lie outside the Greek and Latin works that are his focus as a classicist.